Computer gold from a musical mix tape

[Niku-Sama]

thats one thing i'm surprised i've never come across with all the crap i accumulate i've never found any ones programs stored on cassette.

that is pretty neat

[Greg2600]

Neat story. Occasionally I've gotten a kick out of listen to crazy stuff we recorded on tape with a mic as kids, or venturing through boxes of old diskettes or zip disks. Storing on cassette was something that I or those around me never did. The cassette for computer really never got rolling here.

[YoshiM]

Cassette storage was all we had from about 1981ish until probably around 1986 or 1987 when my Dad bought a floppy drive and a CoCo 2 after roasting his 16K CoCo 1 trying to upgrade the RAM. It was definitely a lesson in patience as a child. I remember one instance where my Dad typed in a program that was multiple files long that loaded individual drawings of the Earth as a globe. After something like a half hour or so, all the images were loaded and a smooth spinning globe appeared on the screen.

Somewhere between 2000 and 2004 when I had a 5 1/4" floppy drive on my tower PC that could actually read CoCo disks, I backed up a lot of my stuff to DSK format using Jeff Vavasour's Tandy CoCo DOS programs. As for cassette stuff, I still had a CoCo at the time and I loaded programs from tape and saved the to disk. Then I imaged the disks.

Over the years I found I still had a couple of tapes after my hardware sell-offs: my 1984 Christmas tape my Dad gave me and one that says "Telewriter 64", which is the word processor my Dad used to write his never-finished novels. I did go through my Christmas tape and found a bunch of stuff I wrote both on CoCo and on TI-99 4A (ie REALLY bad text adventures-though I didn't find a cool Ghostbusters game I wrote in BASIC for the TI. That actually turned out OK).